Musicians, tune your keyboards: playing in a laptop orchestra

A composer and performer himself, Princeton prof Daniel Trueman has been …

The words "laptop orchestra" might conjure up visions of zombie-like players seated at their computers—LAN party style—controlling electronic sounds that form some sort of musical performance. The reality is much more exciting, according to composer, performer, and professor Dan Trueman, who co-founded the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (also known as PLOrk) in 2005 and has since led the proliferation of laptop orchestras around the globe.

According to Trueman, laptop orchestras transcend "old world" performances by offering a new way for people to make music together. They also challenge the traditional notion of what's considered a musical instrument.

Is this just a new fad for music hipsters? Trueman would say: maybe, but who cares?

What is a laptop orchestra?

A laptop orchestra is much like a "real" orchestra. A group of players gets together with the goal of playing a piece—composed ahead of time or improvised—for an audience, except that their instruments are on the computer. According to PLOrk's bio page, the group is an "ensemble of computer-based musical meta-instruments."

PLOrk is definitely not the first group of individuals to realize that synthetic sounds can be used to make music, but it's often identified as the first group to establish the concept of the laptop orchestra. For Trueman, the project began with the BoSSA, or the Bowed-Sensor-Speaker-Array—a sort of electronic version of a violin—that he built in the late '90s. The instrument combines a spherical speaker with violin-like sensors, which allows the user to physically "bow" it to create sounds.

"Crazy, but it's actually quite old fashioned in concept," Trueman told Ars. "The sound comes from the player, radiating in all directions like an acoustic instrument, and it makes you break a sweat to play."

BoSSA held Trueman's attention for a few years, but he was eventually tempted to see whether the same concept could apply to a group performance.

"There was also a teaching motivation: electronic music is typically taught in studios, where you work in isolation. I wanted to get it out of the studios, have people making music wherever and whenever and with whomever, which PLOrk facilitates," he said.

PLOrk was formed with a mishmash of students and researchers who had a wide variety of musical and technical backgrounds. "I think they like it because they can engage many of their interests simultaneously, and challenge themselves," Trueman said. "The engineers can actually apply their training in musical situations, and there is nothing like making music and messing with sound to inspire people to learn how to program."

Here come the clones

Once news about PLOrk made its way around the academic circuit, similar laptop orchestras began popping up elsewhere. Stanford has one called SLOrk. Boulder, Colorado has one called BLOrk. Seattle created one called... well, "Laptop Orchestra." Tokyo and Moscow got in on the action, too.

Though some groups are more active than others, Trueman thinks the proliferation of laptop orchestras is great. "I love what is happening with LOrks (as we call them). They are popping up all over the world, each with their own personality and set of priorities," he said. "I just hope that people continue to explore and build and make music together in all sorts of ways, and that we reach the point where computers and fiddles and guitars and drums can all hang out together and jam."

For example, a new laptop orchestra in Dublin is beginning to take on an "Irish Trad music flavor," and that others have adopted similarly unique traits. Trueman believes the reason they became popular is because laptops are easily accessible—even moreso than "real" instruments.

"Laptops are everywhere, and the notion that they could be musical 'instruments' and that we could play with one another is intriguing," he said. "It's also a great equalizer; laptops don't intimidate and imply decades of practice the way, say, violins do, so people who might otherwise think they are 'not musical' might be willing to give it a go."

"Another way to put this is that we can set the bar for entry wherever we want," he added. "We can make pieces where people of any background can be taught how to participate in just a few minutes, and then off we go, or we can try to make pieces which are much more challenging to play and require days/months/years of practice to get off the ground."

Haters will hate

Like other forms of synthetic music, the concept of the laptop orchestra has its detractors. Some come from the general public—how interesting can a concert with a bunch of nerds on laptops be, anyway?

Trueman understands this complaint and says he the process of making music is more important than finding ways to present it, but he also insists that performances aren't as boring to watch as one might think. "In most situations, if the players are really engaged, it is probably going to be interesting to take in," he said.

Some of Trueman's fellow performers in PLOrk.

Other detractors include older-school musicians and instructors—such as my well-respected and well-loved high school orchestra teacher who is nothing less than a rabid traditionalist when it comes to creating music.

"Lighten up!" was Trueman's advice to such people when I shared the story with him. (Trueman himself is a seasoned violinist with a bonus focus on the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle.) "People who want to play violin will still play violin, and this doesn't replace anything. It's just a new, totally different way for people to make music together."

The appeal of a LOrk, either as a performer or a listener, is that it is different from a traditional orchestra. "I'm not in the least bit interested in having PLOrk play, say, a Beethoven Symphony," Trueman said. Instead, he hopes that his group (and others) can discover and create new music indigenous to laptops.

Besides, technology and music have a long history together—even more traditional instruments like the violin and piano were once considered high tech, too.

The most important thing to keep in mind when thinking about laptop orchestras, Trueman says, is to constantly create music with new and interesting tools. "There are so many new types of music to discover and make, music that we've never heard or imagined before, and they are often found in the unlikeliest of places. It's important to make, do, and worry about it later," he said.

"Finally, and this is actually laptop specific: listen! it's easy to make lots of sound with computers, with very little effort, so it's important to build instruments and make pieces that really engage our ears and invite us to make sound with care, not just in quantity."

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Jacqui Cheng
Jacqui is an Editor at Large at Ars Technica, where she has spent the last eight years writing about Apple culture, gadgets, social networking, privacy, and more. Emailjacqui@arstechnica.com//Twitter@eJacqui